Projects

Worldwide: Health Policy Project

Objectives:

The Health Policy Project’s (HPP) overall objective is to build capacity around the world for improved health policy, financing, governance, and advocacy. The project works with in-country partners at the national and sub-national levels in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and Eastern Europe to sustain commitment to and ownership of sustainable policy and financing responses that support improvements in family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH), HIV, and maternal health.

HPP builds the capacity of governments, civil society, and other local organizations to advocate for and implement policies and plans that shape health services, systems, and budgets—from policy formulation to implementation and monitoring. The project team helps identify gaps, generate evidence, and provide technical assistance to develop and implement multisectoral policy responses that provide a framework for health promotion and development. HPP also assists countries to improve health outcomes by addressing barriers due to gender inequalities, socioeconomic status, stigma and discrimination, operational issues, and other factors that prevent people from seeking the health services they need.

Capacity development for policy, advocacy, finance, and governance within the health fields Family Planning/Reproductive Health, HIV and AIDS, and Maternal Health.

Match Required

10% of expenditures (met)

Any Other Relevant Information

The end of the Health Policy Project marked Plan’s (with the CEDPA acquisition) 20th consecutive year on the consortium implementing USAID’s flagship global health policy projects, beginning with the POLICY Project.

Plan’s team provided technical leadership and assistance across the project’s technical portfolio and geographic reach, particularly in the core technical areas of capacity development, advocacy, and promoting gender equality, with particular focus on:

Empowering women leaders for country-led development. This program offered a unique approach to advancing FP/RH advocacy and leadership skills for women from five African countries with varying levels of experience in civil society, the public sector, public office, and faith-based organizations. The activity provided intensive skill-building; individualized, south-to-south, woman-to-woman coaching; networking opportunities; and small grants to support advocacy plans. A summative brief and a series of videos captures first-person stories of their individual transformations as well as organizational, program, and policy change achievements. For more on empowering women leadership work throughout the project, see http://www.healthpolicyproject.com/index.cfm?id=topics-EmpowerWomenLeaders.

Creating tools, approaches, guidance, and technical assistance for capacity development. To implement the project’s mandate around organizational capacity development, HPP developed an extensive suite of tools and approaches for strengthening state-of-the-art technical and relational capacity for policy, advocacy, governance, and finance at individual, organizational, and systems levels. The Organizational Capacity Assessment (OCA) suite of tools can be tailored for use with multiple types and levels of stakeholders. For more on capacity development throughout the project, see http://www.healthpolicyproject.com/index.cfm?id=topics-CapacityDevelopment.

Strengthening capacity for gender-responsive health policies and programs. HPP worked with government ministries and gender departments to strengthen their role in developing, implementing, and monitoring gender-responsive health policies. For example, HPP facilitated a technical exchange on gender and health between the Royal Government of Cambodia and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic to promote knowledge-sharing across the countries, and facilitated a gender capacity assessment and follow up training to the participating ministries to address gender within the policy cycle. HPP developed tools and methodologies that civil society groups, program managers, and health officials can use to identify gender-related barriers and policy gaps. This includes the Policy Prevents Violence web-based resource, an interactive toolkit that promotes policy approaches for preventing violence against women (VAW). For more on gender work throughout the project, see http://www.healthpolicyproject.com/index.cfm?id=gender.

Local Capacity Initiative. Through the Local Capacity Initiative (LCI), PEPFAR provides direct funding and support to civil society organizations that advocate for and deliver high-quality and sustainable HIV and AIDS programs. Two USAID-funded projects, HPP and Advancing Partners & Communities (APC), provide technical assistance to increase the recipients’ technical and organizational capacity to: 1) advocate for and monitor transparent, evidence-based policies/regulations; 2) engage in each stage of HIV program development and implementation; 3) engage civil society networks/coalitions; 4) engage citizens in recognizing and advocating for high-quality services; and 5) sustain activities beyond the life of U.S. Government funding. The projects collaborated to design the LCI Facilitated Discussion and Capacity Assessment Tool, which HPP applied in six countries to assist grantees to prioritize their capacity needs. HPP used the outcomes to tailor its capacity development support to help grantees meet their respective LCI award objectives.

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